When The Shooting Stops

by Ralph Rosenblum

  The working style that evolved as Woody and I edged our way around the ego traps and pitfalls of this subtle terrain might be described as a Dance of Deference. From the first moments we bent over backward in an effort not to force our opinions on each other. “Do you think we can bring that sequence in here?” I might ask. “Well, there’s a problem with that,” he would respond, “because we want to set up the laugh for the next shot.” “Well, why don’t we cut away before the sequence ends, go in for the laugh, and then come back?” When decisions had to be made, this invariably was the tone of the exchange.

  If I pointed out that something in the script or the filming didn’t work, Woody’s impulse was never to become possessive and defend what he had done, but simply to get rid of it. Often I had to fight him to save a joke that was faulty but not beyond repair. Out of the extreme politeness and respect grew a partnership, and it was for his grace in partnership that I most valued Woody. It accounted for my willingness to cut five of his next six pictures and to tie my last years as an editor to the beginnings of his remarkable filmmaking career.

  As much as I liked Woody, my first impulse when I signed on for Bananas was to do something that would solidify my position and prevent the slave-master mentality from reasserting itself in the cutting room. I told Woody I wanted a more significant role in the making of the film and asked for the title associate producer, a request to which he immediately consented.

  As associate producer, a position I’d wanted merely as an interpersonal prop, I now felt compelled to do something extra, and so, despite my conviction that an editor is less than useless on the set, I embarked for Puerto Rico to be on hand for the filming of scenes about the banana republic whose regime is threatened by a guerrilla revolt. It is difficult to describe how out of place I felt. I particularly remember one dreary, predawn morning on a cliff outside San Juan. Woody was filming a scene in which government troops disguised as a rumba band were cha-cha-ing through the jungle to launch a surprise attack on the rebels. I crouched on the cliffside, cold and uncomfortable, watching the cameraman, the production designer, the unit manager, the production secretary, the makeup man, the gaffers, the grips, the actors, and all their assistants rushing about in that hectic harmony that would ultimately yield an acceptable take. My lonely alienation in the midst of this commotion seemed a high price to pay to maintain the balance I wanted between me and the director. And when the Xavier Cugat look-alikes dropped their preposterous instruments and pulled revolvers from their puffed-out sleeves, only to have their performances spoiled by a sudden downpour, of all the people who went running for cover, I alone could not even feel the camaraderie of shared disappointment. It was the last time I worked on location. I kept the associate-producer title on Sleeper, but by the time we got to Love and Death I realized it was superfluous and dropped it.

  Like much of Woody’s material, the rumba ambush never made the picture, despite his ultimate success in circumventing the elements and getting it properly filmed. It was a hit with the cast and the crew, but it wasn’t funny on screen. Stationed on location, I saw that many jokes that seemed sensational on the set failed to translate into film humor. Because Woody’s comedies are based on a continuous stream of jokes and skits, a larger than usual portion of our editing work entails a search for the moments that work and a careful weeding out of the ones that do not.

  In a scraggly guerrilla camp a sleazy South American comic is ushered onto a makeshift bandstand, and the rebel troops are told that the visitor is Bob Hope. As Hope’s theme, “Thanks for the Memory,” blares out over the camp loudspeaker, the seedy character, who couldn’t pass for Bob Hope in a million years, begins delivering a string of one-liners, and the troops won’t laugh (which makes him all the more hilarious to us). He tries and tries, until Woody, playing Fielding Mellish, the nebbishy New Yorker who gets caught up in the insurrection, says, “Hey, that’s not Bob Hope!” Everyone panics, suddenly aware that the whole thing is an ambush, and, just then, government planes appear overhead dropping bombs. The scruffy troops scatter for cover, but the comic, whose military purpose has already been served, keeps pitching his monologue, growing more and more desperate for laughs as he drones on.

  It was technically a complicated scene, shot from several camera angles, with three fighter planes loaded with phony explosives. All the elements—the dive-bombing planes, the ground-level explosions, the scattering soldiers, the tenacious comic—were captured perfectly. But when we screened the material, it looked more like documentary war footage than a comedy scene and was thus rejected.

  There was always some material that both Woody and I liked but that had to be removed because it went limp before screening audiences. One of my favorite examples concerned the visit of the San Marco director, Emilio Vargas, to the United States to improve his public relations. His itinerary includes a guest appearance on the Cousin Brucie Show, a teenage rock-’n’-roll program on afternoon TV. Vargas, played by Carlos Montalban (“El Exigente” in the Savarin Coffee commercials), gives the adolescent kids a rousing speech on discipline and other topics of fascist concern, and then Cousin Brucie opens the floor to questions. Will the Beatles break up soon? a boy asks. A girl wants to know Vargas’s opinion of double dating. Another what his favorite sandwich is. Why this charming gag failed to raise a chuckle escapes me even now, but in comedy so many elements have to be just right that even the best jokes sometimes perish on the screen.

  Occasionally the reactions of screening audiences helped us uncover a joke that hadn’t been intended. We had one scene in Bananas in which Woody arrives at the San Marco palace for a state dinner with a gift of cake for dessert. Vargas immediately protests, “These are prune, I like cherry,” whereupon he and his henchmen get into a terrible row over what type of cake tastes best. Vargas tries to enlist Woody’s support for cherry, but Woody, in a daring non sequitur, asserts a preference for toasted corn muffins. At this, Colonel Diaz goes into a rage: “Anything is better than a corn muffin! A lousy, stinking, toasted corn muffin!” and only quiets down when armed guards arrive to quell the disturbance. As far as the cake device was concerned, this scene was supposed to have been the joke. But when our test viewers saw Woody arriving at the state palace and emerging from a limousine timorously bearing the tiny white cake box by its string, they howled. Except for Vargas’s initial statement of displeasure at the sight of prune and Diaz’s subsequent insistence that Woody should be eliminated at once (“I could kill him now—he brings cake for a group of people; he doesn’t even bring an assortment!”), we cut the rest of the skit. The joke had already succeeded.

  With so much of his material being removed, trimmed, or modified in the editing, Woody’s cool professionalism was an especially refreshing trait. Not since Helen van Dongen had I worked with someone whose fastidious attention to detail and businesslike attitude about weak or faltering material matched my own. When a scene died, Woody never looked back. “You have to subordinate everything to the laugh” is his attitude, because he knows that if you lose the audience for a minute, you pay for it in that sequence and you pay for it again in the next—when you have to rev them up anew.

  Having learned from Take the Money how many of his sequences fail to make the film, Woody packed Bananas so full of jokes that another movie could have been made from its outtakes. If he thought he needed 150 jokes in an hour and a half, he wrote and photographed 300. And he made them tighter, a joke at every turn, so that the pace would never slacken. His approach to screening was becoming equally methodical. Afraid that viewers might not respond freely if they knew he was present, Woody hid under the control console, a desklike structure in back of the Movielab screening room, while I gave the rough-cut speech. He emerged when the lights went out, stayed to hear the reaction, and then disappeared again just before the film ended.

  As in Take the Money, the original ending of Bananas was weak. The idea was funny, but the execution was faulty, and it could not be fixed. An inadvertent reb
el hero, Woody is invited to give a revolutionary speech at Columbia University, only to be accosted by a black mob intent on knocking off the honkey lecturer as a “gesture to white America.” Woody runs for cover, a bomb goes off, he emerges from the sooty rubble in blackface, and is instantly mistaken for a Brother by three black men with rifles. It was one of those things that never made the transition from paper to the screen.

  I said, “Woody, the end doesn’t work,” a sentence that turned out to be something of a ritual for us. He didn’t stir. I said, “Why not do something that relates to the beginning of the picture?” In the opening scene Howard Cosell narrates an on-the-spot Wide-World-of-Sports assassination of a government minister. Woody sat and thought, and the next morning he came in with a new ending for the film. Howard Cosell is witnessing the wedding-night bridal-suite confrontation between Woody and Louise Lasser, playing the girl who slighted him until she discovered that he was the hero of a Caribbean insurrection. The whole thing would be filmed just like a prize fight—ABC-TV’s you-are-there coverage of their nuptial union.

  Lasser enters the room, carrying her bridal bouquet, sits on the edge of the bed, and pulls off one of her boots. Cosell: “Here comes the bride. She’s got a lot of fans.” Sounds of cheering. “And I think that it is apparent that she is in very good physical condition. And here comes Mellish!” Woody enters with a towel around his neck, his trainer and his handler behind him. As they begin to massage his arms and shoulders, he makes the sign of the cross. “And it’s started!” says Cosell, as the lovers tangle. “The two are working together. It is swift, rhythmic, coordinated.” Woody gets a cut over his right eye; a doctor examines him and allows the action to resume. Then, from under the undulating bedspread, Woody’s arm pops out, his fingers in a “V.” Cosell: “That’s it! It’s over. It’s all over. The marriage has been consummated.” Cosell then interviews the newlyweds, who discuss their coition like two prizefighters. Louise: “I just had no idea that it would be so quick, you know. I was expecting a longer bout.” Woody: “I was in great shape. I thought I had her in real trouble.”

  Bananas was a better film than Take the Money, but it was still unstructured and frenetic without much refinement of plot. With Sleeper Woody took another major step. It was a classic comedy in the tradition of Chaplin and Keaton with a sophisticated plot, intricate sets, and a risky dependence on special effects and complicated machinery. It went beyond anything he had attempted before. “It’s always good to give the critics a moving target,” Woody once quipped, referring to his self-imposed growth. But this lightheartedness can be deceptive. Sleeper proved a monstrous challenge, and tension pervaded every aspect of its production.

  The picture was earmarked as United Artists’ Christmas release, and its firm deadline could be broken only at serious cost to the company, the director, and the relationship between the two. Woody began shooting on April 30, 1973, on a two-million-dollar budget that allotted fifty days for filming. By the time I arrived in California in August he was several weeks into fifty-one days of additional photography, which had already consumed the $350,000 fee he was due as co-author, actor, and director. The robots, the mechanized props, the stunt shots, and, most exasperating, his own performances were either failing or not meeting his exacting standards. In some cases the failures were so repeated—wires and towropes snapping or flying into the frame—that after innumerable takes he moved on and left perfection to the editing.

  Woody does not like the assembly to begin before he has finished filming, but with the release date in severe jeopardy, Jack Grossberg prevailed on him to have me come out to the old Culver City Studios where the picture was being shot and begin cutting at once. I sensed the tremendous stress Woody was under the moment he greeted me on the set, and I could see that despite all his efforts, he was beginning to show signs of impatience with the production team. The stress seemed to exaggerate a conflict between Woody and Jack, thereby ending a long and fruitful relationship. We agreed that I would begin cutting seven days a week while the filming was still in progress.

  Sleeper was being made on the remnants of the David O. Selznick lot where Gone With the Wind had been produced. In the middle of this lot, amid the huge concrete buildings, was Woody’s headquarters, which now doubled as the cutting room—a pretty three-room cottage surrounded by a lawn, a garden full of daisies, and a tall white picket fence. It had been Clark Gable’s dressing room. Each morning I arrived by cab at the compound at eight-thirty, passed through the guard post, and rode through the deserted lot to our little house. Everything was very still at those times, except for the sounds of Woody, who had risen before me, playing New Orleans jazz on his clarinet. With the help of a California editor and two assistants, I assembled a substantial portion of the film in rough form by the time Woody and I returned to New York in September. By the end of the month—with each of us, working with an assistant, editing separate segments and then conferring over the results—we completed a rough-cut version of two hours and twenty minutes. During the next two months of refining, some fifty-two minutes would have to be removed.

  As often happens with Woody’s films, we rejected some of the most impressive material, frequently causing more pain to me than to the author himself. A dream sequence, shot in the Mojave Desert, in which real people were used as chess pieces, is, I think, one of the finest pieces of cinema Woody has ever created. Allen plays a white pawn that is about to be sacrificed. The black knight, a vicious character who has just killed another white pawn, first by smashing him with a mace and chain and then running him through with a sword, says, “You’re next,” as Woody quakes. In addition to the knight, a black bishop (who is menacingly tapping a large crucifix), the black queen, and a tough little black pawn are all moving in on him. Woody: “Hey fellas, it’s only a game. We’ll all be together later in the box.” The disembodied voice of the man playing black announces his decision to take the white pawn, and, ignoring Woody’s pleas, the black knight charges. Woody, hysterical, runs helter-skelter across the board, breaking all the rules of chess. He pauses long enough to feel up the black queen and then dashes off into the desert pursued by the knight. The scene worked magnificently on the screen, and though it failed to fit the needs of Sleeper’s plot and comic pace, I saw in it a forecast of major future accomplishment.

  By mid-October we had the film down to a hundred minutes, and coming close to its final shape when Woody took off for New Orleans to record the score, playing clarinet with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. His own band later recorded additional material for the film. Toward the middle of November, perilously close to the time when we would have to go into the sound studio to spend a week on the mix—getting each sound in the film (a person’s voice, a slamming door) at just the right level—we hit the final snag.

  In keeping with the established routine, I again objected to the ending, which was fiat and relied entirely on a corny visual gag. To redo it, Woody returned to California for a Sunday shooting about two weeks before the picture was released. Diane Keaton, by then working on The Godfather, had to switch back into her role as the light-headed Luna on her day off. It was only through a whirlwind of overlapping labor that we made the Christmas release.

  Sleeper was a trying experience for Woody, but it wasn’t long before he was applying solutions to many of the problems it raised. By the time we got to Annie Hall, he had, with characteristic efficiency, tackled the nuisance of last-minute additions and retakes by including in his original budget two weeks of postproduction photography. And in anticipation of the problem he always has with his scripted ends, the only ending that appeared in the screenplay he presented me was a note that indicated, “Ending to be shot.”

  Having cut all but one of Woody Allen’s first seven pictures (Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex was produced while I was directing the documentary Turner) and having been professionally associated with him longer than with any other director, I am struck by how little I’ve said about th
e personal quality of our working relationship and what he is like as an individual. When Woody and I work, our conversation is generally quiet and sober with few displays of emotion, least of all enthusiasm. At times we spent hours earnestly hashing out problems with the plot or the continuity or about what new material Woody needed to write or shoot. The tone of these conversations was easy and professional with surprisingly little kidding around, personal reflection, or anything approaching intimacy. Woody is very private, very reserved, excruciatingly—at times, maddeningly—controlled. He never snacks when he works; he never betrays what he’s feeling. His paltry lunches, sometimes no more than a glass of club soda, are symbolic of his stoicism.

  I do not count Woody as a close friend, and yet we have so much in common I feel emotionally allied with him. We are both Jewish, both from Brooklyn, both perennially joyless, pessimistic about our chances for happiness, and easily sucked into low spirits. We are both mostly self-educated and have similar passions, such as Russian literature and jazz. We both abhor pretension, whether it be in dress, choice of eating place, or the obnoxious self-importance of many people who work in film.

  Having been a stammerer and always somewhat withdrawn and uncertain about myself, I immediately identified with Woody’s extreme timidity, an issue that arose again and again as we moved through public places and faced his fans. With colleagues, silence is his primary tool for both protection and control, and it works an unsettling devastation whether on a room full of smooth executives at United Artists or a group of garrulous production people on the set. I knew from my own experience that this was the strategy of a proud but insecure man. As a boy I found that if I got angry, I stammered, I blocked, I made a fool of myself. But shut up, and the effect is potent. Maintain that silence, keep from saying the words that put others at ease, that grease the social flywheels, and more sociable people falter and even go to pieces. In Woody, I’d found a man who had taken my own nonverbal protection to its extreme, and I sympathized with all it represented.